Peggy Holloway - Judith McCain 01 - Blood on White Wicker (3 page)

I jumped and he said, “Well, well, what have we here?” I was looking into the darkest eyes I had ever seen. They were such a dark shade of brown, that I thought at first they were black. His hair was indeed black and combed straight back. He was wearing a dark green suit made of some sort of shiny material. I am five feet eight inches tall, and we were eye to eye. He was very thin.

 
“Hey, pretty lady, you look hungry. How about I buy you a burger?”

Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re thinking, this is the oldest story around, but don’t forget, I was just fifteen and besides, I was starving.

But when he took my arm and said, “My car is just around the corner,” I didn’t fall for it.

I said, “Not so fast, I bet they have hamburgers right here.”

In the bus station diner, he ordered two burgers and two chocolate shakes. We had a sort of choppy conversation between bites.

“So, pretty lady, what’s your name?”

“Victoria Masters.”

He laughed and he sounded like a stalled car trying to get started. “Victoria Masters, huh? I don’t know, it sounds pretty regal to me, so I’ll call you Vicky. I’m Dave, by the way. So where are you from?”

“Bishop, Georgia.”

“Where’s that?”

“In Georgia.”

He laughed. “How old are you?”

“I’m eighteen.”

“Yeah, right, and I’m the pope. You know, you’d be really beautiful if you would put on some makeup and take your hair out of those crazy pigtails. Then maybe you’d be believed when you said you were eighteen.”

He was quiet for a while, studying me. Finally he wiped his mouth on the napkin, threw the napkin on the table, lit a cigarette and said, “I can give you a job.”

Now a job is what I needed. “What kind of job?”

He squinted as some of the exhaled cigarette smoke reached his eyes. “Nothing hard, just running errands. You can even stay at my house, room and board free.”

This made me mad, “I know I just got off the bus from Bishop, Georgia, but I’m not a complete idiot”

He laughed again, “You really are a doll. No sweetheart, I really just want to help. I help lots of kids. Let me go pay this bill, and I’ll take you to meet the others.”

While he was paying the check, I took out my compact and looked at myself. People have always told me I was pretty, but I didn’t really like the way I looked. My hair is a sort of nondescript light brown and turns sort of a reddish blonde in the summer. My skin doesn’t burn but turns golden. These are the only things I like about myself. As for the rest, I always thought my eyes were too big, my top lip too short, and my nose did this flip at the end.

“You ready?” Dave asked.

I swung around and knew I was blushing because he had caught me studying myself in the mirror.

I could see that I was taking a chance getting in the car with him but I didn’t have a whole lot of options. We walked around the corner from the bus station and got into a gold colored Camaro. So far, he was a perfect gentleman, opening the car door for me.

He was also a courteous driver, letting people in front of us, allowing plenty of room between his car and any car that happened to be in front of him. After we had been underway for awhile Dave looked over at me and winked, “This here is my brand new Camaro, a 1983. It’s a Berlinetta, top of the line.”

“I love it,” I said, “could you put the top down?” And so he did.

I was enjoying the ride so much now with the wind in my hair, when I suddenly noticed something strange off to the right.

“Hey, Dave,” I said, “pull over, pull over, what’s that?”

“What? What? You scared the living hell out of me,” he said as he pulled over, “what is it?”

“Over there, those tiny little buildings. What are they?”

He laughed so hard I thought he was going to have a heart attack, “Don’t tell me you never saw a cemetery before?”

This made me so mad, I felt like hitting him. “Of course I’ve seen a cemetery. They have cemeteries in Bishop, Georgia. Of course they do. Don’t tell me they put people in little houses when they die here, instead of burying them?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying Vicky. New Orleans is below sea level. If you buried people here, they would float out to sea.”

Well! I could see that living here was going to be different, if they even buried their dead differently. I didn’t want to ask anymore stupid questions so I just looked around while enjoying the sun on my face and the wind in my hair.

I saw what looked like part of a train going right down the middle of the street on a railroad track. We actually crossed that street and railroad track and I turned around to get another look.

Dave looked over at me and said. “It’s a street car, Vickie. We’ll ride on it sometime.

“In fact you’ll probably ride on it all the time since you’re not old enough to have a driver’s license. And don’t look at me like that. I know you’re not eighteen years old. You don’t have to be scared of me either. I will treat you right. Ask the other girls when we get there.

“The area we are going to is where my house is and it’s been in my family for years. My parents died when I was nineteen and I inherited it from them. The area where you’ll be living with me and the girls is called uptown. It’s also called the Garden District. This is it here.”

We pulled up in front of a two story white wooden house with dark green shutters and white wicker furniture on the porch. I felt better already. My reasoning was that no one could be dangerous who liked wicker. The logic of a fifteen year old, what can I say?

Dave acted as excited as a little boy, and ran around and opened my door. I walked up onto the porch and sat in the swing while he opened the trunk and got out my paper bag full of clothes

“Come on and let me show you around,” he said as he ran up the steps. I began to catch his excitement and felt quite adventurous.

As he opened the screen door, he started yelling, “Hey Rhonda, Jesse, Marty, come on down and meet your new roommate. He opened the screen door and winked at me.

“Guess they ain’t home, Oh! Here’s Jesse.”

A black girl came strutting down the stairs. I thought about what the folks back in Bishop would say about me living with a black girl. Even in the eighties, there was still a lot of prejudice in Georgia. This girl was beautiful.

She was light skinned, and I would learn later that she was what they called a Quadroon, which meant that she was one quarter black. She was beautiful with braids all over her head that had glass beads at the ends. She was wearing skin tight, bright green leather pants and a triangle of the same colored leather tied around her neck and middle. As my foster mom used to say, she had a figure that wouldn’t wait. She was wearing gold hoop earrings that I could have put my leg through.

She looked me up and down and said, “Who the fuck is this, Pollyanna?”

Dave glared at her and said, “Don’t give me any of your lip, girl. This here is Vicky all the way from Georgia.”

“Yeah, well, I guess she be all right.”

“You take her up there and put her in the blue room.”

Jesse jerked her head toward the stairs, but then noticed my bag of belongings.

“That your luggage? Well pick it up and let’s go.”

As we started up the stairs, she glanced over her shoulder at me, “You look like you scared to death, girl! Don’t worry. Dave take care of you. He take care of all us. He don’t hit you either. Not like some. I rather have Dave, Me.”

I was later to learn that that’s how native New Orleans people talked. They would say, “I like so and so, me.”

At the top of the stairs, we turned right and three doors down, she threw open the doors, “Here you go! Well your eyes are big as saucers. You like this room?”

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

 
“Think so? You ought to see mine. You have your own bathroom right through here. I’m goin back to my room. Gotta finish my makeup. See ya later.”

I felt like I had landed up in the lap of luxury. Back home I shared a room with Carrie, my eight year old foster sister, and all six of us had to share a bathroom. In this room, everything was blue and white. There were blue carpet and curtains, white wicker bed, rocking chair, dresser and chest of drawers. There was a window seat with blue and white patterned cover and a bedspread to match. The bathroom had blue tile and a bath tub with claw feet. There were white wicker shelves over the commode. From the bathroom window, I could see other houses along the street and a street car running through the street from where Dave and I had come.

As I was putting my few clothes into a drawer, I heard Dave talking to someone down stairs.

“So you’re back? Where you girls been? You got a new roommate. Go on up and meet her. I think Jesse put her in the blue room.”

I could hear them on the stairs and suddenly they were standing in the doorway.

“Why, she’s just a child. Cute though.”

I just stood there smiling at them with a goofy grin on my face. They were both so pretty and smart looking. They were staring back. One was blond with green eyes, a little on the plump side, wearing a tight pair of blue jeans and a yellow shirt.

The other girl was petite with dark brown hair and brown eyes. She was wearing a short dress almost to her thighs and made of some sort of slinky floral pattern.

The blonde’s hair was long and straight, the brown headed one’s hair was short and curly.

“Well,” said the blonde, “Now that we done sizing each other up, this here’s Rhonda and I’m Marty.”

“And I’m Victoria Masters.”

Rhonda sort of snickered and Marty elbowed her and said, “Well, Victoria Masters, we’re glad to meet you”

 
Dave bellowed from down stairs, “What are you girls doing up there? Get on down here, I got a plan.”

We came out of my room just as Jesse was coming out of hers and we went down the stairs together. Dave was just going back into a room on the right and flopped down on a white leather sofa. He threw a leg over the arm of the sofa and grinned up at us, “Y’all sit down over there. Now here’s the plan. Tonight, as celebration of Vicky’s arrival, we’re going to Bourbon Street.”

CHAPTER 2

This was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me. You can’t drive down Bourbon Street, so we parked the car in a parking garage on Canal Street. As we walked down Bourbon Street, I could hear music coming from everywhere. Everything was all lit up.

There were black boys tap dancing on the sidewalk. One of them came up to me and said, “You give me $10, I’ll tell you exactly where you got those shoes you got on.”

Dave took my arm and guided me away from him. I would have like to have had $10 to give him just to find out if he could really do that.

Men were standing in doorways yelling for everyone to come in and see the show. You could actually see strippers on stage from the sidewalk. The street and sidewalks were filled with people carrying drinks in clear plastic cups, cans or bottles of beer. It was the noisiest place I had ever been and it was the most exciting.

The only clothes I had owned at the time were jeans, tee shirts, shorts, and a couple of dresses that Dave said weren’t suitable for Bourbon Street.

After trying on several outfits of Jesse’s and Rhonda’s, it was decided that I would wear a short stretchy tube of a dress of Jesse’s. It was royal blue, covered with sequins, no straps, and came up almost to my thighs. Rhonda had taken the braid out of my hair, and by using almost a can of hairspray, had given me very fat hair. She then put tons of makeup on me. I thought I looked very glamorous and grown up.